Proof of Heaven

This book represents a rather distant departure from the crime novels we usually write about in this blog.

The author is a noted neurosurgeon with remarkable academic credentials, and due to an acute E. Coli meningitis, he spent seven days in a coma and had a near-death experience. The author, a man who had always been anchored in the sciences and had eschewed spirituality, had a profound spiritual experience arising out of this event in which his neocortex shut down for a length of time and more completely than most other patients with near death events. This book was Dr. Alexander’s attempt to rectify his prior lack of consideration of the spiritual side of life.

It’s a very good book, but it is not earth-shaking, spirit-rattling, or whatever expression one might choose, at least not from the perspective of one who has long thought about such matters. Part of the difficulty that Alexander has in attempting to write this book is language, but then he acknowledges that our language is too limited to allow a more complete or accurate description of phenomena that are essentially experienced in a nonverbal way. I think about Alexander and other authors efforts to describe spirituality much like the proverb about blind men who try to describe an elephant. One feels the trunk and likens the beast to a snake, another feels a leg and likens it to a tree, another the ear and thinks it is leaf-like, etc. Like the blind men, Alexander clearly gets a part of the spiritual experience which, as he says, is quite real and valid. However, does he get to the comprehensive wholeness of spirituality? Of course not. He gives the wonderful example of the futility of trying to describe unconditional love to others being like trying to write a novel with only half the alphabet. I agree with him, but he’s made an important attempt to write about unconditional love and spirituality.

Alexander, for the first time in his life, gets the “oneness” of our existence. I thought he made a curious although unconvincing argument for understanding the presence of evil in the world. He wrote, “Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth – no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be.” Much like the Dalai Lama, he talks about living with compassion and writes, “Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything.”

I thought it was a “straw man argument” when he wrote about scientists who are “pledged to the materialist worldview," scientists who insist that science and spirituality cannot coexist. I know some scientists who have easily made this bridge to spirituality, but that is far different than equating spirituality with a Western-like concept of God. The author described that prior to his coma, that he had spent four decades of his life in prestigious research institutions in which he was trying to understand the connections between the human brain and consciousness, and he was previously of the opinion that consciousness did not exist independently. It’s my thought that it was not that the value of his research and studies before the coma were invalid, just that his interpretation of the facts that he had come to learn about the brain were incomplete. He equate consciousness with spirit, and that is something I would never do since I think spirit and spirituality are so much more than just consciousness. As a psychoanalyst, it’s my opinion that there is an important role for unconscious thought processes in all of this – but this may be unnecessary hairsplitting with Dr. Alexander. Perhaps this is just another example of the inadequacy of our language to describe our connectedness to all things.

Near the end of his book is a beautiful poem about life and death, written in 1993 by David Romano called “When Tomorrow Starts Without Me.” Finding that poem alone was worth the time I spent reading Alexander’s book. Without question, Alexander’s book is a good read, a pretty fast read, and it’s a true story that shows that a nonspiritual and rigid-thinking scientist can evolve to a more inclusive understanding of his life.